Jutta Treviranus, Director, Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto

Daphne Ogle, Fluid Project Design Lead, UC Berkeley

Colin Clark, Fluid Project Technical Lead, Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto

An Introduction to the Fluid Project

Topics We’ll Cover

• Project vision and goals• The Fluid community• Improving the user experience• Technology framework• Timelines and road map• How to get involved

Project Vision and Goals

Vision

• Advance status of UI development and design in academic community source projects

• …so that they can fulfill their potential as platforms for innovation

UI = user interface, user interaction, user experience, usability and accessibility

Problem

• Systemic problem of poor and inconsistent UI• Frequently left to programmers• Tackled at the end• Redundantly developed• Inadequately tested and refined• UX designers not well integrated into development culture• And….

“You say tomato, I say tomato, lets call the whole thing off”

• Academic communities are very diverse • We differ greatly in our preferences, needs, habits,

concepts, comforts, convictions….

“Different strokes for different folks…”

• Institutional preferences and branding• Conventions of academic discipline• Cultural differences• Linguistic differences• Differences related to age• Differences related to role and perspective• Different teaching approaches• Different learning approaches• Disability and environmental constraints

Differences related to academic discipline

Differ with respect to:• language (e.g., the meaning of color)• values and notions of quality• tools• environment• modes of interaction and academic engagement

In academia we foster and thrive on diversity.

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UI most critical to any discipline that is:

• Not involved in creating application• Not a discipline familiar to those creating the user

interface

Accessibility

• Legal commitment to equal access• No system-wide strategy, band-aid approach at

greater and greater cost• Guidelines seen to constrain creativity

Three approaches to accessibility

1. Single compliant resource approach

2. Media rich plus “accessible alternative” approach

3. Personalization approach

Goal: Consistent User Experience

• Growing number of tools• Growing number of developers

• A consistent identifiable look• Intuitiveness and transparency of design

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Consistent User Experience vs.Accommodating Differences

• Do we need to choose?• Or can we have our cake and eat it too?

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Proposal: “Flexible User Interface”

• Swappable styles• Swappable UI components• Either runtime transformation for unique needs of

individual• Or customization at configuration

2 Interwoven Approaches

1. Address systemic or process shortcomings as well as education and awareness

2. Address barriers related to the software, architecture and tools

Overarching Goal

• To support the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization/localization, quality assurance and security

Supporting Objectives

To develop:• Architectural framework for a flexible UI• Living library of robust, usable, accessible UI components• Community processes that support innovative, high quality

user experience design and development• Tools and processes for developing and implementing

modular, sharable UI components• Mechanisms for refining components

The Fluid Community

The Context for Fluid

• Poor usability & accessibility are a significant barrier for community and open source software

• Now is the time to address the concerns of our communities

• Our goal is to incrementally improve the overall user experience of Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle

The Fluid Approach

• Cross-project collaboration• Take a holistic approach by combining both

technology and UX design• A two-fold path:

– Social: build a community around UX– Technical: new UI development tools

Participating Projects

• Sakai– Collaboration and learning environment– Teaching, research, and group collaboration

• uPortal– Enterprise portal system– Aggregates personalized content

• Moodle– Learning management system– Strong focus on pedagogy

• Kuali Student– Upcoming, next generation student system– Viable alternative to high-cost commercial products

Fluid’s Relationship to Sakai

• Fluid is a movement within the community• We’re all committed contributors to Sakai• Everyone is welcome• We bring:

– New resources specifically for UX improvements– Lots of technical, usability and accessibility expertise– Cross-project community source collaboration– Fresh ideas

• We’re not doing the only UX work within the community, and that’s a good thing.

Who is Involved?

• Partnership among several universities and corporations

• Toronto, UBC, UC Berkeley, York, Cambridge, MSU, and others

• IBM, Sun, and Mozilla Foundation• Broad range of experience

Design Deliverables

• Start with heuristic and usability reviews• Baseline for usability and accessibility

– Know where we need to improve– Prioritize the pain points

• Designer’s Toolkit: shared design resources– Personas and profiles– Scenarios– UI Design patterns

• U-Camps• Iterative UI design and testing

What are we going to build?

• A living library of flexible UI components that can be used across applications– Easy to wire up and customize

– Components are more than widgets

• A new component framework built specifically to improve usability

• Semantics and specifications• Integration with open source projects

User Experience & the Designer’s Toolkit

Fluid Deliverables

Designer’s Toolkit

• UI Design Patterns– Help grow the current Sakai library

– Extend to uPortal and Moodle

• Component library– Iterative design and testing

– Component design artifacts

– Design Patterns as taxonomy / folksonomy

More About the Designer’s Toolkit

• UX Inspections– Prioritize improvements

– Protocol

• Persona Library– Leverage the Sakai design patterns library

• Design/Development Process• U-Camps

User Experience Inspections

• Goals– Identify pain points– Identify “componentizable” solutions– Drive component work priority– Create shared protocol & process– Provide baseline for future evaluation

• Protocol– Usability & accessibility heuristics– Cognitive walkthroughs

• Organic process

UX Inspection Plan

• Define protocol: we need your help!• Identify functionality “chunks” within applications

– Iterative: focus on highest-used areas first

• Define and share report templates• Subgroup Inspections

– Sakai, Moodle, uPortal, Accessibility

– Synthesize across groups

• Identify issues – Common issues = common components

Inspection Subgroup Work Plan

• Subgroup– 3 to 5 evaluators– Usability and accessibility focus

• Define process and priorities:– Iterative – user profiles– scenarios of use for cognitive walkthroughs

• Perform individual evaluations• Synthesize evaluations and prioritize• Brainstorm design solutions• Collaborate with participating communities

Components

• Components are recurring interactions:– Navigation

– Forms and data

– Direct manipulation of objects

– Workflows, wizards, and sequences

Component Design

• User centered process• Based on real user research• Looking across communities and applications• Agile, iterative process• Close and constant communication with

development• Closely related to design patterns

We Need Your Help!

• UX Inspection– Join a subgroup– Attend the next meeting

• User research of development communities– Define developer and integrator needs for components

• Sakai Design Library WG– Join the group– Weekly meetings

• Future - component design– Stay tuned to the mailing lists

Technology

A bit about the technology

• Unique challenge: how to enable support for very diverse presentation technologies?

• Based on JavaScript, DHTML, and AJAX• Thin binding layer between client and RESTful,

largely stateless server• Loose coupling, works across applications• In translation:

– Web 2.0 made more usable & accessible

Fluid Accessibility

• Web 2.0 will be accessible– it’s just a matter of time

• ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications (W3C)• AccessForAll for component metadata• Ongoing toolkit accessibility support

– Dojo, YUI, others?

• Design specific alternatives• Fluid: Accessibility from the ground up

Flexibility & Customization

• Fluid will be a highly flexible UI layer• At configuration-time:

– Appearance, branding, style, page text

– Locale, reading level, density

– Functionality and user experience

• At run-time:– Swap in accessible controls

– Re-styling for higher contrast, etc.

– Components built for specific disciplines or user needs

Transformation

What is a Reusable Component?

• On the client-side, a Fluid component consists of:– One or more HTML templates

– One or more layers of CSS

– JavaScript for behavioural logic

– Accessibility metadata (control, presentation, etc)

• And on the server-side:– A set of conventions for accessing service logic

– The ability to deliver the appropriate markup, metadata, and user preferences

Anatomy of a Component

Component Architecture

1. Markup-driven components are general:– Server delivers fully-rendered HTML– JavaScript manipulates DOM based on id contract– Greater flexibility and reuse, but greater server dependency

2. Data-driven components are smarter but slower:– Handle their own template processing– Require multiple round-trips to the server for data– Allow for less dependency on server-side presentation

framework

• We’ll support both for different contexts as necessary

The Fluid Framework

• Framework infrastructure– lifecycle supports, server-side communication, etc.

• Components themselves• Transformation engine• Server-side binding and delivery

The Fluid Framework

RESTfulness

• REST: not just a buzzword.• General principle: use the Web’s natural architecture

– Client statefulness, server statelessness– Meaningful URLs– Emphasize named resources over actions– Don’t invent new messaging APIs: use HTTP!

• Benefits:– Back button friendly– Bookmark-ability– Light weight web services– Natural integration point with diverse presentation frameworks– Extract and generalize for reuse

Binding to Presentation Frameworks

• Reality: there are a lot of different presentation frameworks in use today across applications– At least 5 in use within Sakai

• Our approach:– Move appropriate logic and state from server to client– Support the best frameworks– Try to make it easy to bind to other frameworks

• Start with two server-side frameworks:– RSF– Spring Portlet MVC

• We’ll continue to revisit this decision over time• Feel free to help add support to your framework of choice

Component Road Map

• Prioritize based on usability research• Start with specific solutions in context

– Lightbox: organizing images

• Build general solutions over time• Lightbox leads to all kinds of resource organization

components:– Drag and drop

– Folders and hierarchies

– Re-ordering and rearranging items

First Component: Lightbox

• Image Gallery: a mini iPhoto for Sakai• Some clear UX problems to solve

– No way to re-order or sort images in albums

• Plans– Build components for reorganizing images

– Create accessible controls

– Test in Sakai

The Lightbox

Drag & Drop Accessibility

• What does accessibility mean here?– Keyboard access

– Support for magnification and linearization

• Focus on the goal, not the task– Re-ordering images

– Doesn’t necessarily look like DnD

– What alternatives are available on the desktop?

– Cut and paste-style interactions

Lightbox Demo

Project Road Map

Short Term Goals

• Plan heuristic evaluations• Foster a vibrant community• Evaluate technology in practice

– Develop real components with candidate technology

• Create prototype component components– Design, develop, integrate, test, iterate

– Create accessible alternatives or equivalents

• Plan ongoing architecture and design

Where We’re Going Next

• Comprehensive usability evaluations of Sakai, uPortal, and Moodle

• Implementation of new components that improve high-priority UX problems

• Definition of new AccessForAll branch for UI components:– Metadata– Preferences

• Integration and expansion of framework• Helping to make real improvements in Sakai

In Summary

• For more information, visit the Fluid Project web site:

www.fluidproject.org

• Design and development work is ramping up• Goal: incremental, achievable improvements• Join our community, we need your input!